The Chronicles of Crime or The New Newgate Calendar. v. 1/2: being a series of memoirs and anecdotes of notorious characters who have outraged the laws of Great Britain from the earliest period to 1841.Pelham, Camden
History
The Chronicles of Crime or The New Newgate Calendar. v. 1/2: being a series of memoirs and anecdotes of notorious characters who have outraged the laws of Great Britain from the earliest period to 1841.
Pelham, Camden
Crime -- Great Britain; Criminals -- Great Britain; Newgate (Prison : London, England)
Cranstoun sent her the powders, according to promise, and Mr. Blandy
being indisposed on the Sunday se'nnight before his death, Susan Gunnel,
a maid-servant, made him some water-gruel, into which Miss Blandy
conveyed some of the powder, and gave it to her father; and repeating
this draught on the following day, he was tormented with the most
violent pains in his bowels.
The disorder, which had commenced with symptoms of so dangerous a
character, soon increased; and the greatest alarm was felt by the
medical attendants of the old gentleman, that death alone would
terminate his sufferings. Every effort was made by which it was hoped
that his life could be saved; but at length, when all possibility of his
recovery was past, his wretched daughter rushed into his presence, and
in an agony of tears and lamentations, confessed that she was the author
of his sufferings and of his inevitable death. Urged to account for her
conduct, which to her father appeared inexplicable, she denied, with the
loudest asseverations, all guilty intention. She repeated the tale of
her love, and of the insidious arts employed by Cranstoun, but asserted
that she was unaware of the deadly nature of the powders, and that her
sole object in administering them was to procure her father's affection
for her lover. Death soon terminated the accumulated misery of the
wretched parent, and the daughter had scarcely witnessed his demise, ere
she became an inmate of a jail.
At the ensuing assizes at Oxford, Miss Blandy was indicted for the
wilful murder of her father, and was immediately found guilty, upon the
confession which she had made. She addressed the jury at great length,
repeating the story which she had before related; but all was of no
avail, and sentence of death was passed.
After conviction, the wretched young woman behaved with the utmost
decency and penitence. She spent the night before her execution in
devotion; and at nine in the morning of the 6th of April 1752, she left
her apartment to be conducted to the scaffold, habited in a black
bombasin dress, her arms being bound with black ribands. On her
ascending the gallows, she begged that she might not be hanged high,
"for the sake of decency;" and on her being desired to go a little
higher, expressed her fear that she should fall. The rope being put
round her neck, she pulled her handkerchief over her face, and was
turned off on holding out a book of devotions, which she had been
reading.
The crowd of spectators assembled on this occasion was immense; and when
she had hung the usual time she was cut down, and the body being put
into a hearse, was conveyed to Henley, and interred with her parents, at
one o'clock on the following morning.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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